Paul Hopper

Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, Rhetoric and Linguistics

Bio

Paul Hopper's research and teaching have been centered on the connections between rhetoric (discourse) and grammar (linguistic structure). He is interested in working out the implications of an idea first broached by him in 1988, that structure is not immanent in a language but "emerges" through repetitions of favored word groupings in discourse. Along these lines, he wrote the book Grammaticalization (Cambridge 1993) with Stanford linguist Elizabeth Traugott that describes the typical historical sources and trajectories of the forms that make up the grammar of a language.

Some of his work involves a critique of the standard assumptions of linguistics from the perspective of rhetoric. Dr. Hopper is fascinated by structural differences among languages and the search for "the essential" in language, and this interest has led him into a variety of projects, from comparative Indo-European and the Malayo-Polynesian languages to discourse analysis to the study of human-ape communication. He has published articles and written and edited books on Indo-European and Germanic philology and on Malay discourse.

Dr. Hopper has been editor of the journal Language Sciences, and have served on the executive committees of the MLA's Language Theory section and of the Linguistic Society of America. He has also been the Collitz Professor at the LSA's Linguistics Institute, and has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.